So who else reads this nonsense?

So this morning I ranted a little about a post over at Manero.org. Tony said Mark needs a presentation layer so that he can markup his content any way he wants. After reading my response, he then very politely asked me to explain my comments, as he wasn't sure what it was that I disapproved of. I didn't think he'd ever come here and read my post... Hey Tony, how'd you find me?

It's my opinion that we have a misunderstanding here. Maybe it's just me, but maybe it's not. I don't think we all understand what Mark's problem is and how it relates to the different pieces of the standards/publishing puzzle.

Mark uses Movable Type. It lets him publish his page using templates that can translate his data into whatever form he likes. Mark makes an XHMTL 1.0 template and gets an XHTML page. He makes an XML template, and gets an XML page. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Mark's complaint, as I understand it, is not with his ability to transfer his content into any given format, his issue is with the semantics available to him in a particular format: XHTML 2.0. Now to be fair, he can change to a differnt mark up langauge, and he did choosing HTML. Did you hear him complain that his content management system couldn't handle the conversion? That his data was poisoned and it was sooo tough to take all that text and mark it up differently? Nope. You heard him say (and I'm paraphrasing) that it sucked that XHTML 2.0 dropped the semantic pieces he liked using.

I don't think there's a problem with the CMS, I think there's a problem with semantics, what we do with them, and what we expect from them. If you add them to your text, it becomes very easy to change them from format to format with a quick search and replace. The question is what you should be adding in the first place. Mark has mentioned the difficulty surrounding semantic markup in the past. One that he missed is conveying the actual purpose and meaning behind creating semantic pages. That's where the problem is.

I guess I lashed out at Tony unfairly, but this is the second time someone responded to a comment Mark made by claiming he should throw a different content management system at his troubles and they'd go away. I don't think that's the case. At all.